11 ms·

Unless the interviewer has totally lost sight of the purpose of the interview, they’d recognise a candidate starting at an offset from 50 as an instant pass.

by enneff 2y ago

ozim 2y ago
What was the last time you were on the interview? I think like 70% of interviews I ever had were like they were there to prove how smart they are and how stupid I am. I suppose most likely to make me feel stupid and accept lowball offer.
- HarryHirsch 2y ago
  Like this one: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/07/27/ohreally/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/07/27/ohreally/ Yes, that happens, and elsewhere she goes on about culture in tech.
  - wisemang 2y ago
    I don’t doubt this happens but seems like a poor example. She effectively rooted out a bullshitter. No worries if you don’t know how a tool works, but just say I don’t know. That answer was nonsensical.
    - HarryHirsch 2y ago
      The purpose of an interview is not to root out a bullshitter but to find someone you can work with. If that guy doesn't know about TCP/IP, move on to the next topic. If the guy has poor attitude, be polite. Just don't waste time with making fun of the candidate, it does not reflect well on interviewer and company. For what we know, the guy may well have been employing "test-taking strategies", and he may have been led down the garden path by the interviewer. There's far too many posts in Rachel's blog where she goes on about "the one", who knows much better already, and here she channels the asshat that she complains about when she encounters him at work.
  - treatmesubj 2y ago
    Is the guy's response really that far off? Each router checks its table for the destination, and if it doesn't know it, queries the next upstream router, its default route, the next hop. Each router likely ultimately informs you of the hand-off via a packet of some sort, and your then traceroute sends a ping/ICMP to each hop to learn how far away they are. He maybe could've been pushed to expand on what he did know in more detail, but it seems like she just threw out SNMP as misleading bait, and he maybe mixed up ICMP and SNMP. She is right to call herself a troll, but wow, that's crazy to say she caught the guy in a lie of insanity.
    - HarryHirsch 2y ago
      Is the guy's response really that far off? When you think about it, the candidate isn't even that wrong. Back then, at university, a certain professor would explain the oral exam to the candidate at the beginning. He would explain that he would incrementally increase the difficulty and skip from area to area. The goal would be to find the limits of the student's knowledge, the student would walk away feeling terrible, and he, the professor, didn't enjoy the experience. That's how it ought to be, but here? OK, candidate doesn't know ICMP well, next topic, no need to waste time and dig in. Here's another unfavourable thought: some people with abusive childhoods react very badly to dominance displays, and here is Rachel engaging in just that. One wonders what had happened before.
      - SonOfLilit 2y ago
        Downvoted for jumping from legitimate criticism of her interview methodology to very personal and completely baseless accusations. This is not the internet I want to live in.
        HarryHirsch 2y ago
        This is not the internet I want to live in Storytime! In a previous workplace a disagreement over fire safety with escalated into uncalled-for and unwelcome dominance behaviour from my supervisor. All attempts to deescalate were rebuffed, and now there is litigation from multiple plaintiffs, this person took out her sociopathic tendencies on many people. With a minimum of professional detachment or a HR department with a clue the peace would have been kept. (Yes, a few months later the fire marshal issued a code violation, as predicted.) You may not wish to live in that internet, but we live in a world where sociopaths are overrepresented in leadership positions. Something rubs me here just the wrong way. Rachel complains about ageism and contempt for women in tech, and with good reason, and then she takes it out on an overenthusiastic candidate who can't read the room.
  - rpdillon 2y ago
    I strongly agree with the sibling comment that this is a perfectly valid interview question. One of the biggest red flags in an interview is if I ask a question and the person doesn't know how to say 'I don't know', because it suggests there's a big risk that if I assign them a task in their day-to-day work, they won't tell me if they feel unprepared to tackle it. That's a far bigger issue than not knowing that traceroute uses variable TTLs to figure out the timing along the route.
    - HarryHirsch 2y ago
      The problem with "I don't know" is that it's really not culturally appropiate to say! Americans are supposed to be rugged, resourceful individualists and asking for help is frowned on because it shows weakness. Can't do that in an interview!
      - delian66 2y ago
        "I do not know" is not asking for help. It is a statement of fact.
- hamburglar 2y ago
  And in particular, this was rampant at Microsoft in the Ballmer days.
- NickC25 2y ago
  One of the worst interviews I ever had was just like that. Often times, the "gotcha" part is just dumb and nonsensical, yet gives the interviewer(s) a sense of misguided (false) superiority, and wastes everyone's time. I would venture to say that 99% of the time it's complete un-indicative of how effective the candidate would be in the role. Referring to my aforementioned bad interview - the question, after all the technical stuff had been cleared (this was for a junior frontend dev role) - they asked "imagine a car is broken and not running. how would you go about figuring out how to fix it?". Being someone whose brother and father enjoyed fixing cars, I asked every question about the problem with the car - how it was used, what sort of car it was, what the issue with the car was, what prior problems the car had, etc. I got a bunch of useless answers. After I exhausted all my questions, the interviewers told me I had failed. Why? One interview brought out a tiny hotwheels car with a missing wheel out of his pocket, and proclaimed to say "you didn't ask if it was a real car, it's a toy car, of fucking course it's not supposed to run like a real car!" while laughing hysterically. How on earth does that indicate if a junior frontend dev can do their job or not? Stupid.
  - moritonal 2y ago
    Great interview from a certain perspective. You knew for sure (if you had a choice) that you didn't want to work for this specific person.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - dllthomas 2y ago
    > How on earth does that indicate if a junior frontend dev can do their job or not? Playing devil's advocate, maybe a junior frontend dev that doesn't trust that they understand what someone is asking for and pushes back on bits that should be obvious will perform better (in some contexts?) than one that doesn't. For a junior role in particular, though, it really doesn't seem like that should be the threshold and it sounds like it was delivered poorly on top of that.
- EricE 2y ago
  It goes both ways - one interview turned into an acronym gotcha session. I quickly figured out that was not a place I would want to work; another friend that ended up working their later confirmed my suspicions.
- cbsmith 2y ago
  This is why successful organizations shadow interviews.
  - inputError 2y ago
    [dead]
- jliptzin 2y ago
  Yea, they’re pointless. The amount of time someone spends on a truly difficult and important problem is maybe 0.1% of their job. And usually it’s better to just call in a domain expert anyway if it’s something that important. The other 99.9% - do they show up on time and work hard, do they care about the company, do they fit in with the rest of the team, etc, mostly can’t be determined in a short interview anyway.
- enneff 2y ago
  It’s been a long long time since I was interviewed for a job, but I have conducted a lot of interviews since then and any signal that the candidate has engaged with the question and has interesting thoughts about it is a huge plus. FWIW I would never ask these kinds of gotcha questions. I just give simple programming problems and talk through solutions with the candidates, and then throw in complications to the questions to make them more interesting and test more areas of the candidates knowledge and problem solving abilities. Yknow, like what happens on the job every day.
  - ozim 2y ago
    Good for you, as you look for someone to work with, not someone to cut down their offer. I am basically doing the same as I also interview people - but I also check the market from time to time as I am not company owner. But I basically don't care about the offer if company pays guy much or not it is not my money and I only win if I get a smart, nice person who knows his job to work with.
jncfhnb 2y ago
> I see you passed this guy after a single guess. Why was that? > Well, he guessed 69, sir, so I assumed he was doing some serious game theoretic calculations
- enneff 2y ago
  I didn’t mean he passes the entire interview, just that he saw through the question and it’s probably best to move on to something else.
krisoft 2y ago
Not really. The question was "Should you accept to play this game?" That is not a question where a number is an expected answer.
- enneff 2y ago
  I’m assuming the context of making the guess is explaining the thought process. Otherwise how would that even come up?

Unless the interviewer has totally lost sight of the purpose of the interview, they’d recognise a candidate starting at an offset from 50 as an instant pass.

by enneff 2y ago

Unless the interviewer has totally lost sight of the purpose of the interview, they’d recognise a candidate starting at an offset from 50 as an instant pass.

ozim 2y ago

What was the last time you were on the interview? I think like 70% of interviews I ever had were like they were there to prove how smart they are and how stupid I am. I suppose most likely to make me feel stupid and accept lowball offer.

HarryHirsch 2y ago
Like this one: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/07/27/ohreally/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/07/27/ohreally/ Yes, that happens, and elsewhere she goes on about culture in tech.
- wisemang 2y ago
  I don’t doubt this happens but seems like a poor example. She effectively rooted out a bullshitter. No worries if you don’t know how a tool works, but just say I don’t know. That answer was nonsensical.
  - HarryHirsch 2y ago
    The purpose of an interview is not to root out a bullshitter but to find someone you can work with. If that guy doesn't know about TCP/IP, move on to the next topic. If the guy has poor attitude, be polite. Just don't waste time with making fun of the candidate, it does not reflect well on interviewer and company. For what we know, the guy may well have been employing "test-taking strategies", and he may have been led down the garden path by the interviewer. There's far too many posts in Rachel's blog where she goes on about "the one", who knows much better already, and here she channels the asshat that she complains about when she encounters him at work.
- treatmesubj 2y ago
  Is the guy's response really that far off? Each router checks its table for the destination, and if it doesn't know it, queries the next upstream router, its default route, the next hop. Each router likely ultimately informs you of the hand-off via a packet of some sort, and your then traceroute sends a ping/ICMP to each hop to learn how far away they are. He maybe could've been pushed to expand on what he did know in more detail, but it seems like she just threw out SNMP as misleading bait, and he maybe mixed up ICMP and SNMP. She is right to call herself a troll, but wow, that's crazy to say she caught the guy in a lie of insanity.
  - HarryHirsch 2y ago
    Is the guy's response really that far off? When you think about it, the candidate isn't even that wrong. Back then, at university, a certain professor would explain the oral exam to the candidate at the beginning. He would explain that he would incrementally increase the difficulty and skip from area to area. The goal would be to find the limits of the student's knowledge, the student would walk away feeling terrible, and he, the professor, didn't enjoy the experience. That's how it ought to be, but here? OK, candidate doesn't know ICMP well, next topic, no need to waste time and dig in. Here's another unfavourable thought: some people with abusive childhoods react very badly to dominance displays, and here is Rachel engaging in just that. One wonders what had happened before.
    - SonOfLilit 2y ago
      Downvoted for jumping from legitimate criticism of her interview methodology to very personal and completely baseless accusations. This is not the internet I want to live in.
      - HarryHirsch 2y ago
        This is not the internet I want to live in Storytime! In a previous workplace a disagreement over fire safety with escalated into uncalled-for and unwelcome dominance behaviour from my supervisor. All attempts to deescalate were rebuffed, and now there is litigation from multiple plaintiffs, this person took out her sociopathic tendencies on many people. With a minimum of professional detachment or a HR department with a clue the peace would have been kept. (Yes, a few months later the fire marshal issued a code violation, as predicted.) You may not wish to live in that internet, but we live in a world where sociopaths are overrepresented in leadership positions. Something rubs me here just the wrong way. Rachel complains about ageism and contempt for women in tech, and with good reason, and then she takes it out on an overenthusiastic candidate who can't read the room.
- rpdillon 2y ago
  I strongly agree with the sibling comment that this is a perfectly valid interview question. One of the biggest red flags in an interview is if I ask a question and the person doesn't know how to say 'I don't know', because it suggests there's a big risk that if I assign them a task in their day-to-day work, they won't tell me if they feel unprepared to tackle it. That's a far bigger issue than not knowing that traceroute uses variable TTLs to figure out the timing along the route.
  - HarryHirsch 2y ago
    The problem with "I don't know" is that it's really not culturally appropiate to say! Americans are supposed to be rugged, resourceful individualists and asking for help is frowned on because it shows weakness. Can't do that in an interview!
    - delian66 2y ago
      "I do not know" is not asking for help. It is a statement of fact.
hamburglar 2y ago
And in particular, this was rampant at Microsoft in the Ballmer days.
NickC25 2y ago
One of the worst interviews I ever had was just like that. Often times, the "gotcha" part is just dumb and nonsensical, yet gives the interviewer(s) a sense of misguided (false) superiority, and wastes everyone's time. I would venture to say that 99% of the time it's complete un-indicative of how effective the candidate would be in the role. Referring to my aforementioned bad interview - the question, after all the technical stuff had been cleared (this was for a junior frontend dev role) - they asked "imagine a car is broken and not running. how would you go about figuring out how to fix it?". Being someone whose brother and father enjoyed fixing cars, I asked every question about the problem with the car - how it was used, what sort of car it was, what the issue with the car was, what prior problems the car had, etc. I got a bunch of useless answers. After I exhausted all my questions, the interviewers told me I had failed. Why? One interview brought out a tiny hotwheels car with a missing wheel out of his pocket, and proclaimed to say "you didn't ask if it was a real car, it's a toy car, of fucking course it's not supposed to run like a real car!" while laughing hysterically. How on earth does that indicate if a junior frontend dev can do their job or not? Stupid.
- moritonal 2y ago
  Great interview from a certain perspective. You knew for sure (if you had a choice) that you didn't want to work for this specific person.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- dllthomas 2y ago
  > How on earth does that indicate if a junior frontend dev can do their job or not? Playing devil's advocate, maybe a junior frontend dev that doesn't trust that they understand what someone is asking for and pushes back on bits that should be obvious will perform better (in some contexts?) than one that doesn't. For a junior role in particular, though, it really doesn't seem like that should be the threshold and it sounds like it was delivered poorly on top of that.
EricE 2y ago
It goes both ways - one interview turned into an acronym gotcha session. I quickly figured out that was not a place I would want to work; another friend that ended up working their later confirmed my suspicions.
cbsmith 2y ago
This is why successful organizations shadow interviews.
- inputError 2y ago
  [dead]
jliptzin 2y ago
Yea, they’re pointless. The amount of time someone spends on a truly difficult and important problem is maybe 0.1% of their job. And usually it’s better to just call in a domain expert anyway if it’s something that important. The other 99.9% - do they show up on time and work hard, do they care about the company, do they fit in with the rest of the team, etc, mostly can’t be determined in a short interview anyway.
enneff 2y ago
It’s been a long long time since I was interviewed for a job, but I have conducted a lot of interviews since then and any signal that the candidate has engaged with the question and has interesting thoughts about it is a huge plus. FWIW I would never ask these kinds of gotcha questions. I just give simple programming problems and talk through solutions with the candidates, and then throw in complications to the questions to make them more interesting and test more areas of the candidates knowledge and problem solving abilities. Yknow, like what happens on the job every day.
- ozim 2y ago
  Good for you, as you look for someone to work with, not someone to cut down their offer. I am basically doing the same as I also interview people - but I also check the market from time to time as I am not company owner. But I basically don't care about the offer if company pays guy much or not it is not my money and I only win if I get a smart, nice person who knows his job to work with.

jncfhnb 2y ago

> I see you passed this guy after a single guess. Why was that? > Well, he guessed 69, sir, so I assumed he was doing some serious game theoretic calculations

enneff 2y ago
I didn’t mean he passes the entire interview, just that he saw through the question and it’s probably best to move on to something else.

krisoft 2y ago

Not really. The question was "Should you accept to play this game?" That is not a question where a number is an expected answer.

enneff 2y ago
I’m assuming the context of making the guess is explaining the thought process. Otherwise how would that even come up?